Thursday April 13th
It has officially been a week since HBA began! A lot has happened.
Looking back at my last post, I now realize just how quickly things can change. Don’t worry!! I’m still having a great time. But WOW the classes are hard. I am sleeping less. Because this is an intensive program, a day’s worth of material here is equal to a week’s worth of material at Harvard. This also means that one month here equals one semester there.
I spent most of last Sunday previewing the material for the first day of class because we start off each 8AM class with a 小考 (small test) including fill in the blank, true false, and dictation. Although the test itself is not long, it does require us to memorize the meaning of over 60 vocab words each night and how to write at least 30 of them. From those 30, the teachers select 5 for the dictation. Needless to say, it’s been extremely challenging. A lot of the non-vocab words are new to me, since the Yale curriculum is slightly different from Harvard’s. What all of this academic stuff means is, I’ve been spending a lot less time exploring and a lot more time grinding.
Just in case anyone is curious, here is what a typical day/week looks like:
Monday-Thursday:
8AM-9:50AM: 大班 (big class aka 6-7 students aka not that big)
10:10AM-12:00PM: 小班 (small class aka 3-4 students aka pretty small)
Lunch Break
1:30PM-2:20PM or 2:25PM-3:15PM: 单班 (one-on-one class aka me and teacher aka as small as it gets)
3:15PM-6:00PM: Free time usually spent doing homework or random things (for some reason we really enjoy going to the supermarket. Will elaborate later on.)
Dinner
After dinner: study study study for 小考
Friday:
8AM-10AM: Written exam!
10AM-11AM: Oral evaluation!
Usually some excursion organized by the school
Saturday:
A trip to a famous landmark/place (this weekend we’re going to the Great Wall of China)
Instead of traditional class on Thursdays, we have a full day of review. On paper, this sounds extremely dull. However, the amount of fun I had today was kind of unreal and reminded me that learning can be exciting (cliche but true). For 大班，we spent around 50 minutes reviewing terms and sentence structures but for the rest of class, we watched videos about the various parenting techniques that exist in China and the education system. For the last 20 minutes, our teacher let us interview our three teaching assistants about their experience with the 高考, China’s infamous college entrance examination. Considering that I wrote my entire Light Fellowship application about how I wanted to research this topic while I was in China, you can only imagine how excited I was to learn about their experiences. For the first time in a long time, I was on the edge of my seat and had an endless stream of questions.
小班 consisted of more review, but we somehow ended up playing charades with the 成语 (four character sayings/mottos/idioms) we learned. It reminded me that I have a poor memory. But it was also refreshing to see just how each 成语 breaks down into its separate characters, how for some 成语 we were able to explain one whole phenomenon, and for others we had to really pull apart the words and meaning. Group classes ended back in 大班, where we were contestants in a debate show. My debate was about whether or not wider parking spaces for women is discriminatory, and the other considered if it was “wasteful” for highly-educated women to become stay at home mothers. For both debates, we listened to each others points, laughed at our poor acting abilities, and tried to squish as much grammar into our sentences as possible, even when it wasn’t totally applicable. It put me in such a good mood.
One last quick ramble about the classes before I finally move on: even though sometimes I feel like my Chinese sucks, because these lessons are extremely challenging and the language used is super formal and most of the time it takes huge effort for me to be able to say what I want to say, the discussions we’ve had have been really cool. I don’t mean cool like wow you can say that?? But cool as in the topics we discuss in class. I’ve had conversions with my teachers about some pretty serious societal issues: abortion, women’s rights, educational equity, media influence and fake news, modernization vs. tradition, etc. I can’t say that I can fluently discuss these topics now, but I’ve at least had the opportunity to share my thoughts, no matter how grammatically incorrect.
But besides academics, the fun parts of HBA have been really fun. Even though the language pledge is very much in place, communicating hasn’t been as impossible as we had imagined it to be. It has, above all, been a test of our creativity, how well we can go around the terms we don’t know in order to express ourselves. For example, my friend Matteo, who is a level-two student, didn’t know how to say gloves in Chinese. Instead, he said “uhh 。。手的衣服“ which roughly translates to “hand clothing.” We understood him just fine.
Occasionally, a group of us will travel to 五道口 to eat a meal off campus. So far, we’ve tried two restaurants, both of which were very good and relatively inexpensive. To put in perspective how POPPING that place is, we probably won’t be able to see all of 五道口 even if we went every day for the next two months.
Tomorrow, I have exams all morning (I am writing this blog post instead of studying). After that, a trip into the city to explore Beijing street food. Pictures to come!
Also considering making a separate blog post just for the supermarket nearby. You’ll see.